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Practice Scuffles Leave Redskins United

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Tempers were flaring on Saturday between the Redskins and Texans in their final joint training camp practice, leading to a unifying moment for Washington's 90-man roster.

In a steady rain with a large crowd on hand, the Redskins and Texans were expected to get in a long, quality final joint practice on Saturday in Richmond, Va.

But within minutes of what was supposed to be the first of several unit drills between the two teams, players were scrapping, with numerous scrums breaking out on both fields.

The Washington Redskins and Houston Texans had to be separated after three scrums broke out during their joint practice Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, at Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Center in Richmond, Va.

Duke Ihenacho said the incidents -- and the immediate fall out -- were all about having each other's' backs as teammates, even though they don't want something like this to happen again.

"We preach it all the time about changing culture, we need to develop a winning attitude and an aggressive and tough mentality and a take no prisoners, take no crap mentality," he said. "So when one of our brothers has an altercation, we want to play football, but we're trying to protect our brother. That's the most important thing to us."

Niles Paul echoed Ihenacho's sentiment, saying that he was "proud of how aggressive" his teammates were in protecting each other.

"Everybody came in and had each other's back," he said. "Even when the defense got into it we all ran to each other's side. Obviously we can't do that in a game because everybody would get fined or suspended, but we did what we were supposed to do as a team and you can see it's coming together."

Chris Baker said things started brewing yesterday when the Redskins got the better of the Texans, and it carried over early into today's practice.

"We were just having a good practice and No. 60, their starting center, came and tried to clean the pocket out and we exchanged some words," he said. "Ain't nobody gonna come in here and talk some smack and try to set the tone here, so we're going to be the tone-setters around here."

Eventually both teams were separated and work continued with the Redskins and Texans having intersquad work.

While they were still able to work on plays and evaluate players, a frustrated Redskins head coach Jay Gruden said that not being able to play against the Texans one more time was a missed opportunity.

"Obviously, it wasn't a good situation, but we missed an opportunity to get better today against a good team," he said. "A lot will be written about that, what happened today. But really we had two excellent days against them and I appreciate them coming. It's an unfortunate happening."

Team camaraderie is important, but in the end, Keenan Robinson says things like this can't happen during the regular season.

"We just have to be careful in the future making sure that we don't do anything that could hurt us as a team," he said.

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